ESPN should not have suspended Jemele Hill for her latest violation of its corporate social media guidelines. ESPN should have simply fired her.

After Hill’s first Twitter-based political controversy, wherein she drew fire for calling President Donald Trump a “white supremacist,” ESPN took the unusual step of announcing that Hill’s words “do not represent the position of ESPN” and that the Worldwide Leader had “addressed this with Jemele.”

At surface level, this action/reaction seemed survivable for all concerned. Sure, Hill’s colleagues were placed in the nearly impossible position of wanting to agree with and/or support her while simultaneously somehow not getting remonstrated themselves. Additionally, the show had to go on. So again, it was messy, but manageable.

Indeed, Hill herself seemed to have reached some useful conclusions in a thoughtful, even-handed essay she posted to The Undefeated (an ESPN property) a few weeks ago, after the initial controversy had died down:

Twitter wasn’t the place to vent my frustrations because, fair or not, people can’t or won’t separate who I am on Twitter from the person who co-hosts the 6 p.m. SportsCenter. Twitter also isn’t a great place to have nuanced, complicated discussions, especially when it involves race…I probably need to take some classes about how to exercise better self-control on Twitter. Lesson learned.

As another ESPN employee might put it… not so fast, my friend:

ESPN was, shall we say, miffed when Hill used her Twitter platform to denigrate the President. But any effect her shots at Trump might have had to ESPN’s bottom line via lost viewership and subscription losses were going to be tangential and really difficult to prove.

This time, Hill made the mistake no media member should ever make: She advocated boycotting the advertisers on NFL broadcasts. Hill bit the hand that feeds. ESPN’s business ties to the NFL are deep and expensive. They are also sort of fraught with underlying tension, as this New York Times piece noted:

ESPN gets a less-impactful schedule than NBC’s “Sunday Night Football.”

ESPN never gets a Super Bowl and only began to carry a single annual playoff game in 2015.

ESPN lacks the flex rights of NBC, which can swap a suboptimal matchup for one that is more promising on CBS or Fox, as it did Sunday. Instead of carrying its scheduled Jets-New England game, NBC took Denver-Kansas City from CBS.

For that lesser deal ESPN pays the N.F.L. $1.9 billion annually, nearly twice what any of its network rivals shells out.

Try to see this from ESPN’s perspective. What incentive does the NFL have to give ESPN a better deal, with better games, if ESPN’s 6:00 p.m. SportsCenter anchor is recommending that people switch the games off and stop buying the advertisers’ products?

Hill’s latest Twitter volley took direct aim at the business interests of the Dallas Cowboys and their owner Jerry Jones, and only slightly indirect aim at the business interests of the NFL. “America’s Team” is worth $4.8 billion and remains the most valuable club in the league.

So ESPN suspended her:

ESPN’s September reprimand of Hill following the Trump controversy, consistent with the above, was all the warning Hill was due. Keep your Twitter feed clean if you want your job. If the past 48 hours have proven anything, it’s that Hill learned nothing from her prior mistakes.

Hill clearly does not want her current job on the terms offered by ESPN. She wants to keep herself in the news cycle. Hill also apparently has no real concern for the impact her actions repeatedly have on her co-host, Michael Smith, who sat out last night’s show as a demonstration of his support for Hill.

The temptation is great to view Hill’s actions as persistence, as activism, as cloaked in an effort to advance a greater good. Maybe they are.

But more to the point, Hill’s actions are a second, more grievous violation of the social media rules her employer has put in place for her and for all of her colleagues.

Go to your job today and violate a company rule; hopefully, you’ll only get a warning.

When you break the same rule a few weeks later, intentionally or carelessly, for the right reasons or for the wrong reasons, what do you think your employer will do?